Classic Skin Now In Nightly Builds

Thursday June 22nd, 2000

Now that skin-switching is a reality in Mozilla, the developers have been working on a "Classic" skin for Windows, Linux, and Mac. The "Classic skin" aims to not only provide a more "Communicator"-like UI alternative for Mozilla, but also give users more platform-specific UI widgets.

If you run Windows, you can try out the "Classic" skin in the current nightly builds. Start up Mozilla, go to the prefs dialog via Edit > Preferences, visit the Appearance > Themes pref panel, choose "Classic" from the list of available skins, and click the "Apply Theme" button. After a moment of whirring, Mozilla wil be skinned with the "Classic" theme. There's still a lot of work to be done on the skin, but it's worth checking out.

I find that there is pleny of feedback. To take just the big round buttons:

* When they are disabled, they are clearly "greyed out".

* When the mouse is over them, the white border thickens noticeably.

* When you click on them, they move; if the click started a page transition, the throbbers begins to animate.

Pretty much every clickable element in the main window responds to a mouseover, except the security and offline buttons and the gfx widgets. They all move or highlight in some fashion when they are clicked.

I guess we have different tastes in interfaces; luckily Mozilla is skinnable to cater for both our preferences.